


Love Song From a Dead Goddess to His Beloved

by QueenofCheese (Supertights)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Love Songs for Idiots, M/M, Mild Language, Reimagined as Reincarnated Goddesses, Sheith AU Week 2019, So Niche Too Niche, The Author Regrets Everything, Wicked + Divine Barely, mention of violence, possibly nsfw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-20 06:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18987220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Supertights/pseuds/QueenofCheese
Summary: Two goddesses find each other again at a truck stop diner. One was once Takashi Shirogane. The other was Keith Kogane. Now they sit opposite each other as Styx and Artemis. A Wicked + Divine AU.





	Love Song From a Dead Goddess to His Beloved

**Author's Note:**

> For @damnspacebois and @helahound for their Sheith AU Week 2019 | Day 1 - Splendour & Symbolism.

The goddess Styx rose up from the shadows between two semi trailers like a black cloud, and staggered heavily to slump against an enormous tyre. He rested there for a few minutes before leaning over and throwing up. After a time, he straightened and he wiped his face with his fingers, and looked around. He'd emerged from the underworld at a truck stop diner with a gas and go, next to a sleepy highway. 

Ancient forests towered on either side of the blacktop and the trees whispered in their own language, gossiping about his unseemly arrival.

A tiny brass bell above the diner entrance rang and he turned to watch an older couple step out into the cold. They walked towards a station wagon with a u-haul trailer on the far side of the parking lot. Almost as if an afterthought, they glanced in unison with eyes that weren't their own, to where he stood frozen between the trucks. Their gaze slid over him as if he wasn't even there, then back to their car.

For a moment, he wondered if he was still dead.

Pulling the hooded bomber jacket tighter about his shoulders, the blue satin strained to contain the breadth of them. Just as the designer skinny jeans struggled to contain everything from the hips down and cupped his ass like a rough lover; all he wore was borrowed and not of his own personal style. He took a pair of Chopard sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. Scratched and scuffed, they didn't look like the $400K they'd probably cost Aphrodite, but if the love goddess could lose them in the pocket of a jacket then the guy could stand to lose them forever.

While the hangover of the earlier evening receded behind the glasses, the pain that lay beneath it throbbed. Throbbed where the bridge of the glasses sat uncomfortably on healing scar tissue that sliced across his nose. Scar tissue that reminded him of his last show, the final line to his anthem on his lips as the crowd chanted it back like a battle hymn.

 _Fight back, my brother,_  
_Fight back, my love,_  
_Return from darkness,  
_ _A champion (champion)..._

The station wagon drove past him with a roar, the trailer hitting a pothole and jolting loudly in a screech of metal. He jumped away from the noise, and a shudder passed through his entire body.

Putting his hand on the door, the bell tolled his entry into a dull haze of noise, mostly coming from an old jukebox that someone had recently fed Tom Jones. Finding the last booth station empty, he lowered himself onto the sticky leather seat with a sigh and dropped his hood down, scraping his hand through tangled hair that smelled of sweet smoke and sweat, and showered glitter every time he moved his head.

At the gas pumps outside, an obscenely large red pick-up truck pulled in and triggered a bell on the forecourt that rang inside the diner. A deer carcass lay grotesquely displayed across the hood, the head was angled towards him. The driver revved the engine loudly several times but Styx had already turned towards the softer sound of overworked, tired feet, and an underpaid job as it arrived by his side with a steaming pot of coffee.

The pot was a lawsuit in the making if it hit anyone in the groin, he thought, and discreetly crossed his legs, angling his hips to avoid any unforeseen accidents.

"Coffee?" asked a waitress with circles so dark under her eyes, set so deep into a round cheerful face, she could legitimately be re-designated a rare North American panda. The woman set a cup down in front of him when he answered with a nod.

He wondered if he looked as hungover as he felt. "Black and hot and keep it coming," he said with a white tooth smile that chased away the darkness hanging around her face. "Please."

"Sure thing, sweetheart," she said, filling his cup and losing a year of pain and age for every minute she was in his company. She'd die on exactly the same day but she wouldn't suffer as much between now and then. A kindly sweetheart said with just the right amount of genuine compassion could make that much of a difference to a down and out goddess. She sighed as the swelling in her feet receded.

Styx's smile disappeared when the truck pulled up on the other side of the window, headlights like spotlights, dazzling, rendering him blind. He raised his hand to block the light and when they snapped off, the deer's black eyes gazed reverently into his. He'd never thought to say a prayer to an animal but he murmured one for the deer.

The bell rang again and a few seconds later the pickup truck driver sat down opposite Styx. He was wearing an old rabbit fur ushanka that'd seen better days if the dark smears on the white were anything to go by. Snatching it off, he dropped it on the seat next to him, and shook a tangled head of black hair out, roughly combing slim fingers through the silky darkness. "You don't write, you don't call." He peeled himself further out of a large hunting jacket to reveal a black band shirt with _"Styx"_ emblazoned in silver over a beautifully detailed screen print of his face that looked just a little bit _too_ real. "I began to think you were dead like everyone said." His eyes darkened to encompass Styx's missing arm, the hair, and the scar, and he nodded slowly as his reality took on a new shape. "Happy to be wrong."

"Not entirely wrong." Takashi Shirogane known also as Shiro and now Styx, looked at the shirt with a questioning eyebrow. "Is that official merchandise, I don't recall approving it?" He remembered seeing a video of the old rock band of the same name burning the entire batch of merchandising during a music festival in upstate New York. When the legality of the name was still being debated in the courts. The gods won out on keeping the name but not the merch.

Artemis grabbed up the greasy menu on the table, his stomach grumbling. "Hardly. It's bespoke."

"You had it made custom? I'm touched."

"I never claimed to have taste."

"Touché." The shirt looked pretty thin though, and well worn in, clinging to Artemis's sculpted pectorals perfectly.

The waitress returned to pour the other goddess a cup of coffee and refilled Shiro's with shaking hands and a half aborted curtsy.

"What was that? Are you the patron goddess of waitresses as well now, Keith?" Shiro watched her scurry away with the breakfast order thoughtfully. "And more importantly, do they know that you are?"

"I do what I can."

And that was a problem, because it wasn't the way it all worked.

Become a god or goddess, be a selfish asshole if you hadn't started out that way, alienate your friends if you had any, make music, get rich, get laid frequently, die badly. Or at least die so drunk and or wasted you don't feel it coming.

You sure as hell didn't take on charity work while you did it.

None of the other gods were like Keith. Shiro wasn't like Keith either. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. About everything."

Keith frowned and looked away. "I woke up on that plastic chair and you were gone from your hospital bed. Missing. Until I saw you online in a shitty video filmed at the Centralia concert right before the explosion. Then nothing more for a year when you just-- _popped_ up in a small club in Cuba singing a ballad. Christ. A _ballad_? With Aphrodite playing acoustic guitar in the background?" Keith shook his head in disbelief and grinned. "I don't know if I can love you after that."

Ignoring the offended tone, Shiro snorted. "I was at Varadero Beach because that's where the underworld spat me back out after it was done. The concert had been a moment ago in real time for me but at least I wasn't actually bleeding out anymore. Aphrodite and Freja helped me clean up as much as they could." Blood, not all of it his. Everywhere. In his hair, in his clothes, under his nails, in the leather of his favourite boots, on his skin and in every crack and nook and cranny. "They didn't care that I interrupted their party because I was alive. It sobered everyone up fast which was funny as hell, and, after I was less messy, they took me to a club to get drunk off my ass and make a reappearance to the world. I was so grateful to be alive but no one knew where you were. So yes... a fucking love song." He ran his hand through his hair, spraying Keith with glitter and watching with amusement as the other man picked it off his clothes with distaste. "After that, Ginza for food, I needed a taste of home. Seattle until midnight. A guard at the aquarium let me in to watch the fish if I autographed his left tit. Jokes on him, it's permanent when I do it. Then I came _here_ ," he gestured around the room, encompassing all he could see, with a tiny frown at his brow. "I don't know why. I felt a calling. _Maybe_."

"A calling?" Keith didn't look sure whether to believe him or not but he shook his head and moved on. "I saw what you did at the concert, you saved a lot of people." Keith poured an endless amount of sugar into the cup and stirred it with difficulty. A plate of breakfast meats with eggs and grits was set down in front of him but the woman was gone again before he could thank her. He ate with an appetite, demanding Shiro try this or that during but Shiro politely declined each time. "The bombers were arrested twelve months ago, hours after it happened, after you disappeared."

"I'm surprised you let them live."

"It was close, if they'd tried to run, they wouldn't have got past the yard. Save us all from idiots wanting to be internet famous. They wanted to be the first to kill a god. Everyone thought you were dead." Keith reached out to caress Shiro's cheek and Shiro leaned into the warm calloused skin with a sigh. "Glad it didn't stick, even if it took a while to come back." His thumb traced the scar and Shiro shivered. "I like your hair."

Bleached of life in the underworld or on the journey back, it shone platinum under the lights. Keith abruptly leaned over the table and cupped Shiro's face, kissing him with a rough unspoken emotion. "You taste like puke," he said when he was finished, poking his tongue out. "Gross."

"I missed you too."

Keith laughed and flipped him the bird.

"What's with Bambi's Mom?" Shiro asked, thumb hooked to point at the truck outside where the hood decoration watched them.

"It came with the truck, which I technically stole from a couple of good old boys taking a piss on the side of the road. You've reminded me though." Snapping his fingers, the jukebox screeched to a halt in the middle of _It's not unusual_ , and everyone in the room turned to look, not at Keith, but beyond the glass, at the truck. The deer slipped out of the ropes like Houdini to land on newborn feet and ambled away into the dark.

"Too bad we can't save ourselves that way," mused Shiro, delighted. The cook and the waitress returned to their work, and the one remaining diner fell back into their meal. A slice of peach cobbler waited cooling on the counter next to his elbow. Shiro's mouth began to water for a slice of pie with creamy vanilla ice cream.

"Yeah but you clearly worked some magic to survive."

"Maybe."

"Play your new song."

"No."

"I'll get you some pie."

Shiro got up with a groan and studied the jukebox. "It's not on there."

"Sing it for me, then."

"I don't want to sing anymore. It was one night only and you missed it." Holding out his hand, Shiro pulled Keith to his feet and slipped his arm around the other man's waist. Keith looped both of his around Shiro's neck and they slow danced in silence. "I heard from Aphrodite that you've been avoiding the stage, I didn't expect to see you without a wolf pack of a thousand socially awkward teenagers and their phones. Why are you hiding out in the middle of nowhere, stealing cars and reviving the wildlife?"

Keith grinned, all shining feral eyes and sharp teeth. "I've been hunting but never finding even a hint of my prey. I was losing faith." His throat moved, swallowing down something bitter. "Then I caught a fresh whiff, coming from Cuba. I followed it to Tokyo. Seattle. _Here_."

"You were hunting for what?  _Me?_ "

"I never stopped searching."

Dreamily, Keith began to hum the melody of Shiro's new ballad, which segued into softly singing it. He stumbled over lyrics that Shiro knew better than his own soul, lyrics no one had ever heard. Keith sang his part in a duet he didn't know was a duet by _feel_. "It's my favourite," he said, once he'd run through the lyrics. "I'll never love another song as much as I love this one."

Shiro's heart swelled. 'I'll never love another person as much as I love the one in front of me,' he thought. Or maybe said. He couldn't be sure except for Keith's eyes, wide and shimmery.

They shuffled around and stared at each other, emotion caught between them, unflinching and raw but also honest. "I didn't have anything to offer you then, Keith, I'm still not sure if I have anything. I was always going to die, one way or another," Shiro said softly, so low Keith almost missed it.

"I never needed an offering."

Shiro dipped him and grinned when Keith squeaked. "All gods want an offering."

With a wary expression, Keith took the bait, "Oh?" Shiro spun him away to the end of his fingertips then dragged him back, to rest against his chest as they swayed. "What was it?"

"A love song, streamed by a German tourist with her phone, standing five feet away from me in a smokey club in Varadero Beach. The first and the last. I only have one love."

"You can't retire yet, have you seen the effect your music has on people?" Keith's eyes begin to brim, moist and shaky, and he pulled away to rub at them with rough hands. He grabbed his jacket and shoved himself back into it, slapping his hat onto Shiro's head. He upended his pockets, leaving a pile of cash on the table, much more than their shared meal could've cost. "Let's go. I can't talk about this here."

Shiro sighed and gathered Keith back in, holding on tightly. "I believe you promised me pie." Styx took promises very seriously.

"If you sang for me."

Pouting softly, Shiro kissed the top of Keith's head. "When we're alone then. All my songs for you and only you."

"Then you get as much pie as you want." The waitress appeared beside Keith, a bag in her hands, an entire peach cobbler inside with a tub of ice cream on top. He took it from her with a grateful smile and shoved it into Shiro's hands. "And I'm driving."

**Author's Note:**

> I've tweaked it, I'm sorry if you got a double triple notification. Might've tried to be too clever but fuck it. Very vaguely Wicked + Divine type alternate universe but not exactly that same universe. And why goddesses? Well why not?


End file.
